THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE; The Burden

By Michael Ignatieff

Published: January 5, 2003

Correction Appended

I.

In a speech to graduating cadets at West Point in June, President Bush declared, ''America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish.'' When he spoke to veterans assembled at the White House in November, he said: America has ''no territorial ambitions. We don't seek an empire. Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.''

Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but ''empire'' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.

A historian once remarked that Britain acquired its empire in ''a fit of absence of mind.'' If Americans have an empire, they have acquired it in a state of deep denial. But Sept. 11 was an awakening, a moment of reckoning with the extent of American power and the avenging hatreds it arouses. Americans may not have thought of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon as the symbolic headquarters of a world empire, but the men with the box cutters certainly did, and so do numberless millions who cheered their terrifying exercise in the propaganda of the deed.

Being an imperial power, however, is more than being the most powerful nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest. It also means carrying out imperial functions in places America has inherited from the failed empires of the 20th century -- Ottoman, British and Soviet. In the 21st century, America rules alone, struggling to manage the insurgent zones -- Palestine and the northwest frontier of Pakistan, to name but two -- that have proved to be the nemeses of empires past.

Iraq lays bare the realities of America's new role. Iraq itself is an imperial fiction, cobbled together at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 by the French and British and held together by force and violence since independence. Now an expansionist rights violator holds it together with terror. The United Nations lay dozing like a dog before the fire, happy to ignore Saddam, until an American president seized it by the scruff of the neck and made it bark. Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.

America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ''the ark of the liberties of the world.''

In this vein, the president's National Security Strategy, announced in September, commits America to lead other nations toward ''the single sustainable model for national success,'' by which he meant free markets and liberal democracy. This is strange rhetoric for a Texas politician who ran for office opposing nation-building abroad and calling for a more humble America overseas. But Sept. 11 changed everyone, including a laconic and anti-rhetorical president. His messianic note may be new to him, but it is not new to his office. It has been present in the American vocabulary at least since Woodrow Wilson went to Versailles in 1919 and told the world that he wanted to make it safe for democracy.

Ever since Wilson, presidents have sounded the same redemptive note while ''frantically avoiding recognition of the imperialism that we in fact exercise,'' as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said in 1960. Even now, as President Bush appears to be maneuvering the country toward war with Iraq, the deepest implication of what is happening has not been fully faced: that Iraq is an imperial operation that would commit a reluctant republic to become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratization and oil supplies in a combustible region of Islamic peoples stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan. A role once played by the Ottoman Empire, then by the French and the British, will now be played by a nation that has to ask whether in becoming an empire it risks losing its soul as a republic.

Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, has written recently for The Times Magazine about Bosnia and Afghanistan. He is a contributing writer for the magazine.

Correction: January 26, 2003, Sunday An article on Jan. 5 about the United States as the ruler of a new kind of empire associated a political theory erroneously with a recent study by a Georgetown University professor about nonmilitary aspects of promoting American interests abroad. ''Warrior caste,'' a concept introduced by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and defined as the military presence used by a world power to project its influence, was not cited in the study by Robert J. Lieber.